CD Projekt announces the completion of development on The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and the role-playing sequel is on track for its scheduled release on May 17. Here's word on the game:

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is the eagerly awaited sequel to the award-winning, million-selling RPG that captured the imaginations of discerning players everywhere. It introduced a truly unique protagonist, the professional slayer of monsters, Geralt of Rivia, and defined a new standard for thought-provoking, non-linear game narration, with mature themes, significant choices that werenít automatically good or bad, and true decisions that led to meaningfully different consequences.

The Witcher 2 builds upon these distinctive strengths within an all-new storyline filled with complex characters, captivating political machinations and intriguing challenges. It also features a new, brutal combat system that uniquely combines tactical elements with dynamic action. The proprietary REDengine, designed and built in-house to support the specific demands imposed by the gamesí complex, branching style of open-ended storytelling, also takes full advantage of the latest advances in graphical technology.

It's interrupting an attack/animation and then failing which makes button mashing not possible.

If you start an attack but can't interrupt it to dodge or block, that leaves you wide open to attacks from your enemies, especially if you miss or are surrounded. The big question is how well can enemies defend themselves once they get hit. Are they basically stunlocked until you kill them? That seems to be the case based on the videos I've seen. However, I don't know what difficulty setting the videos show or whether difficulty settings affect AI at all.

From what I've read and seen, many enemies can block and use it efficiently which causes Geralt to recoil and get off-balance. There's this shield squire that if you don't use magic on him first, you won't get through his shield. Also, enemies zerg you. So no Assassin's Creed kinda stuff here. They don't wait for eachother to hit you first! Geralt is nearly always outmatched in numbers so that certainly adds to the difficulty. Besides, is it really that weird if Geralt makes short work of the enemy in a 1 vs 1 fight? He is the legendary White Wolf!

From what I've seen from presentations and the preview on Gametrailers.com, I hold good hopes that the combat will be dynamic and challenging.